There is some good in not having accomplished anything historic in your life: you don't have to fight a posthumous battle to win public opinion to your cause, two centuries after being gone.
"The world belongs to Bonaparte
," wrote Chateaubriand a few years after the death of the Emperor;
alive, he missed the world, dead, he owns it;
after having undergone the despotism of his person, we must undergo the despotism of his memory ”,
wrote a visionary Chateaubriand.
This is because in the year of the bicentenary of his death, Napoleon would not be the figure of French greatness or the father of a large part of our institutions but above all a "misogynist", "racist", "genocidal. ", Or" slave ", which earned him a statue unbolt in 2020 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
In our columns, Alexis Corbière considers that
“the Republic cannot pay official homage to the one who was the gravedigger by putting an end to the first republican experience.
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